Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (79 page)

IF WE DO NOT ACT TO END WAR AND RACISM THEN HOW WILL IT EVER END. THE FROST SHOW ON THE 24TH AND THE CAVETT SHOW ON THE 26TH ARE ESSENTIAL. WE CANNOT GET AIR TIME WITHOUT YOU. WE ARE COUNTING ON YOU

“I am certainly in favor of those great abstractions but the prospect of talking politics is alarming,” Williams wrote to his director, William Hunt. “Being a human centipede I will probably manage to get all 100 feet in my mouth at once.”

In the end, he capitulated to Rader and came north to do his bit for the People’s Coalition. On the day of the event, wearing a sort of Confederate uniform in a misguided attempt to look young and cool, Williams, accompanied by Bill Barnes and a camera crew from the Canadian Broadcasting Company, who were filming him, arrived to take part in the exercise in radical chic. Williams sat in the fourth row with Rader and the British director Peter Glenville, while Charles Mingus, the Chambers Brothers, Phil Ochs, and Edgar Winter and White Trash performed for the nearly five thousand people who had paid up to fifty dollars a ticket to show their solidarity. A parade of speakers followed: the Episcopal bishop of New York Paul Moore Jr., Gloria Steinem, Ossie Davis, David Dellinger, and Williams. “I am too old to march anymore,” Williams said in his peroration. “No, no!” the audience yelled back. Williams held up his hand for silence. “But I will march on paper!”

Williams sat down to an ovation. He was followed by Norman Mailer’s forty-five-minute protest play
Why Are We in Vietnam?
—a work whose profanity on the cathedral’s high altar so offended Williams that he stalked out in protest. “Suddenly ‘The Movement’ was unmasked for me by the Cathedral’s desecration and by the display of shallow exhibitionism,” he wrote later. “By the drugs, the decadence, the spitefulness and finally by the hideous blasphemies of the play.” He remembered the benefit as “probably the most shocking and disillusioning experience of my life, which has contained a great deal of shock and disillusionment.” The event, an organizational fiasco that ended up losing nearly ten thousand dollars, put a crimp in his relationship with Rader and brought a full stop to Williams’s political activism. “I avoided all affiliations of a political nature all of my life till I met you,” he wrote to Rader. “And I’m going to avoid them totally from now on.”

Still, the rhetoric of the protest movement stayed with him—and was built into his Last Will and Testament, which was written on June 21, 1972, and witnessed by Rader. In it, Williams requested a burial at sea, in the Caribbean, north of Havana, near the spot where Hart Crane took his life. The document instructed that his obsequies were “to be conducted by my revolutionary comrades . . . those desiring freedom from an imperialistic and militaristic regime.” Williams’s jejune quest had led to some enduring and defining emotional knowledge. In himself and in the embattled political world around him—“this ambience of continual dreadfulness”—he registered a growing barbarity. “I was thinking last night . . . that there has been a terrible erosion of the capacity for sympathy and for pity among us all,” he wrote to Rader that July. “So much horror . . . the heart wears out the breast and we stop feeling as we did for each other.”

THAT PSYCHIC NUMBING found its way into the rewrites of
Small Craft Warnings
, in a soliloquy delivered by Quentin—a washed-up homosexual screenwriter, in blazer and ascot, who has “a quality of sexlessness, not effeminacy”—that Williams considered “the finest writing I’ve done since the early plays”; it was also the finest he would do in the last decade of his theatrical life:

QUENTIN: . . . There’s a coarseness, a deadening coarseness, in the experience of most homosexuals. The experiences are quick, and hard, and brutal, and the pattern of them is practically unchanging. Their act of love is like the jabbing of a hypodermic needle to which they’re addicted but which is more and more empty of real interest and surprise. This lack of variation and surprise in their . . . “love life” . . .

) . . . spreads into other areas of . . . “sensibility”?

) . . . Yes, once, quite a long time ago, I was often startled by the sense of being alive, of being

Present on earth, in the flesh, yes, for some completely mysterious reason, a single, separate, intensely conscious being,

!

Whenever I would feel this . . .

, this . . . shock of . . . what? . . . self-realization? . . . I would be stunned, I would be thunderstruck by it. And by the existence of everything that exists, I’d be lightning-struck with astonishment . . . it would do more than astound me, it would give me a feeling of panic, the sudden sense of . . . I suppose it was like an epileptic seizure, except that I didn’t fall to the ground in convulsions; no, I’d be more apt to try to lose myself in a crowd on a street until the seizure was finished. . . . They were dangerous seizures. One time I drove into the mountains and smashed the car in a tree, and I’m not sure if I

to do that, or . . . In a forest you’ll sometimes see a giant tree, several hundred years old, that’s scarred, that’s blazed by lightning, and the wound is almost obscured by the obstinately still living and growing bark. I wonder if such a tree has learned the same lesson that I have, not to feel astonishment anymore but just to go on, continue for two or three hundred years more? . . . This boy I picked up tonight, the kid from the tall corn country, still has the capacity for being surprised by what he sees, hears and feels in this kingdom of earth. All the way up the canyon to my place, he kept saying,

as if nobody, Magellan or Balboa or even the Indians had ever seen it before him; yes, like he’d discovered this ocean, the largest on earth, and so now, because he’d found it himself, it existed, now, for the first time, never before. . . . And this excitement of his reminded me of my having lost the ability to say: “My God!” instead of just: “Oh, well.”

Williams went into rehearsals feeling, as he wrote to Bill Barnes, that the play “can do no harm, even if it fails to do good.”

Still, the rehearsals were fraught. Hunt was dismissed; for a time, until Richard Altman was hired to finish the job, Williams himself served as director. “I certainly had no desire to take over direction, but I felt obliged to since all the stage movements seemed arbitrary,” Williams said. “Someone has just told me that when I took over the direction the leading lady said, ‘Why should I take direction from this old derelict?’ ”

On Easter Sunday, April 2, 1972,
Small Craft Warnings
opened at the Truck and Warehouse Theater, near the Bowery, a venue that Williams thought a “metaphor for posterity,” signaling a change in fortune if not in style. The Easter opening worried Williams, for it might give the critics a stick with which to beat him. “They’ll say the Resurrection didn’t come off,” he joked. If
Small Craft Warnings
wasn’t exactly a resurrection and wasn’t exactly a hit, it was still a comeback of sorts. The reviews were mixed. “The critics in New York are no longer inclined to make allowances for my advanced age nor for the dues I’ve paid,” Williams complained to St. Just after the opening. “They keep saying, ‘This is not up to Williams’ best, such as
Streetcar
and
Cat
’—Well, for Chrissake, how could it be? If it were a major play such as ‘Out Cry,’ it would not have opened at the Truck and Warehouse in the Bowery, would it?”

In fact, the reviews of
Small Craft Warnings
were sufficiently positive to give Williams hope that the narrative about his work might be changing.
Show
, a posh short-lived theater magazine, ran a long article subtitled “The Revitalization of a Great Dramatist,” and Clive Barnes’s review in the
New York
Times
concluded that
Small Craft Warnings
“may survive better than some of the much-touted products of his salad years.” In
Time
, Ted Kalem welcomed the play as “a five-finger exercise from the man who is the greatest living playwright in the Western world.” “Surely you meant ‘playboy of the Western World’—but never mind,” Williams quipped, when thanking Kalem for his “incredibly beautiful notice.”

Small Craft Warnings
turned out to be Williams’s most successful new theatrical outing in nearly a decade; it played two hundred performances, in a run of nearly six months. That June, when ticket sales dipped, and the actor playing Doc—a doctor who has lost his license to drink but practices clandestinely—left for a four-day film gig just as the play was transferring to the New Theatre uptown, Williams stepped in. “Goddam it, no, I will play it myself!” he told the producers, who took him up on the offer. “A star is born,” Williams wrote to St. Just. “We have played to packed houses. And no cabbages thrown. I guess I have to admit that I am a ham and that I loved it.” Although Williams’s performances gave the show a commercial kiss of life, onstage he was something of a loose cannon, prone to ad lib. “He never shut up,” the actress Peg Murray, a veteran of three of Williams’s late plays, said. The other actors never knew when their cue was coming. “Just watch his lips,” William Hickey, who played Steve, a short-order cook, said. “When they stop moving, you come in.” When nobody was depending on him for a cue, however, as Murray recalled, “he was wonderful in the part.”

That September,
Small Craft Warnings
was forced to close, to make way for
Oh, Coward!
, a Noël Coward musical revue (“a pair of jerks imitating Gertie Lawrence and Nelly Coward in a nostalgic tribute to their—whatever they did,” Williams called it). In the last few days of the run, Williams’s behavior, by his own admission, became alarming. In a rage over the impending closure, he ranted at the theater management in his opening monologue (“A synonym for a manager in the theatre is a con-man—and all playwrights are shits with their back to the wall”) and threw a glass at the audience. In another performance, in a scene in which Doc returns from losing a mother and her baby in a botched delivery and is asked how things went, Williams replied loudly, “Not as bad as they’ll go at the New Theatre tomorrow if they close us for Nelly Coward.” At one performance, when a heavy-set drunk in the audience shouted abuse at the stage, Williams leapt off the proscenium. “We were all terrified,” Murray recalled. “This little round man in his white suit went up to this big guy. ‘You will not insult the artists!’ Tennessee said. It was overwhelming.”

Playing “Doc” in the Off-Broadway production of his
Small Craft Warnings
, 1972

Earlier in the run, the management had complained about Williams’s failure to project his voice, but toward the end he said, “I was belting out every line like Ethel Merman through an amplifier. . . . I guess I am just getting a bit bored with so-called ‘rational behavior’ now in these ‘vintage years.’ ”

For a decade, drama critics had been reminding Williams that he was a thing of the past; now, some zealous members of the gay liberation movement were also calling him a relic of reactionary times gone by. “Tennessee, look, an army of lovers is beginning to arise. It is being born from among the victims, the queers, the women you were among the first to love,” Mike Silverstein wrote in an open letter on the pages of
Gay Sunshine
in 1971. “We were queer like you, victims like you. But now we are gay, no longer accepting our victimization, and proudly proclaiming our humanity.” Silverstein, a fan, addressed Williams demanding a new narrative; other activists were less polite, characterizing Williams as a fogy, whose writing had no purchase on homosexual reality.

In a 1972
New York
Times
article, “Why Do Homosexual Playwrights Hide Their Homosexuality?,” for instance, “Lee Barton”—a pseudonymous writer who had also written “Nightride,” an Off-Broadway drama about a black-white gay marriage—wrote from the perspective of a man looking forward to “the ‘freed’ generation”: “One work of art dealing truthfully with homosexual life is worth a hundred breast-beating personal confessions,” he said, throwing down the gauntlet. “Who really gives a damn that Tennessee Williams has finally admitted his sexual preferences in print. He has yet to contribute any work of understanding to gay theater, and with his enormous talent one of his works would indeed be worth any amount of personal data.” Williams responded a month later in the
Village Voice
: “I feel sorry for the author. He makes the mistake of thinking I’ve concealed something in my life because he writes under a pseudonym. I’ve nothing to conceal. Homosexuality isn’t the theme of my plays. They’re about all human relationships. I’ve never faked it.”

Years later, in a reply to an annihilating
Gay Sunshine
review of Williams’s
Memoirs
, which called his plays “lies” and “complicated misrepresentations of reality,” Williams took issue at length with the “shocking misapprehension of my work” and with the review’s rhetorical incivility, inadvertently underscoring the distance between Williams’s view of himself as the “founding father of the uncloseted gay world” and that of the bumptious new generation: